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Photos From Madrid

Spain is swell, I just wish my guidebook had warned me that the city walls in Ávila are closed on Mondays. Various people told me there wasn't much worth seeing in the Reina Sophia besides Guernica but those people are mistaken (a couple of great Dalí's, among other things). At any rate, here's a couple of photosets now up on my Flickr page -- this is the Madrid Botanical Gardens, which was great. I took a whole bunch of pictures of the Plaza Colón as well, even though nothing there especially justifies the attention. I just thought the monument was really odd and couldn't stop clicking.

Comments

The Parque del Buen Retiro is great. My favorite spot aside from the lake is the Statue of the Fallen Angel. It's the only major public statue of Lucifer, thrown from heaven and condemned to a lifetime of pigeon shit.

this coming saturday, matthew, either be in front of a tv set or find your way to barcelona and scalp a ticket for barcelona v. real madrid. this is the great rivalry of spanish soccer, the rough equivalent of yankees-red sox, but since soccer is the only team sport that matters to the spanish, bigger.

real madrid is full of aging superstars (zidane, roberto carlos, david beckham, and the out-of-shape although still young ronaldo) while barcelona has the in-their-prime ronaldinho (the best player in the world) and samuel e'to, and the rising young argentinian Lionel Messi, Barcelona should kick their butt, but of course in these big emotional matches, form doesn't always tell.

The Camp Nou, where Barcelona plays, is said to be one of the great soccer stadiums. If you're still in Madrid, i guarantee you that virtually eveyrone will be watching the match on tv.

just to continue to hijack this thread a little longer, arsenal getting to the finals is, of course, a longshot, but after the last two years of liverpool and porto, anything can happen. i'm certainly looking forward to arsenal-juventus tomorrow.

It's the national sport in Spain, hence the relevance. On the same trip I was in Seville for the Sevilla/Real Betis derby. It was an amazing day: half the city festooned in green and white (Betis' colors) and the other half in red and white (FC Sevilla's colors). Great day for this norteamericano to be wearing blue.

It's a major part of the culture. Also FC Barcelona and Real Madrid both have basketball teams. Pau Gasol of the Memphis Grizzlies used to play for FC Barcelona.

Petey,

Perhaps someday you can tell us how good the smoke is when you're waiting for your new oxygen tank.

"Petey, Perhaps someday you can tell us how good the smoke is when you're waiting for your new oxygen tank."

Randy Paul,

I hope you suffer a very prolonged and very painful disease in which you rot from the inside out. I hope your asshole and tiny genitalia become constantly and horribly painfully for years before falling off. I hope you get insensitive and substandard medical care that needlessly increases your agony. And I hope you die alone and untended to several days after your colostomy bag has exploded open.

"I move for a moratorium on any and all comments on this thread judging other people's decisions, beliefs, or behaviors related to smoking, as it is clearly NOT a productive line of discussion."

It's as productive a line of discussion as any other except when putrid scum like Randy Paul decide to hope for the demise of other commenters.

A modest proposal would be that we should check and see if Randy Paul has any other beliefs that would shut off productive lines of discussions. Maybe he wishes for the doom of black folks or looks forward to the day that global warming kills millions of Bangladeshis. Then we could know that we should avoid those topics in order to avoid Randy Paul's sliming all over the thread.